The FRBR Blog

Your faithful correspondent continues to cover all things FRBR at the IFLA conference. At 4 PM there was a two-hour session about cataloguing with four presentations. I missed the first one, by Liz McKeen of Library and Archives Canada, but caught most of the second one, by Mirielle Huneault of the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec. Nothing FRBRy in her talk, as I recall.

Next up was Beacher Wiggins of the Library of Congress: “The Library of Congress Takes a Look at the Future of Bibliographic Control.” It was a review of WoGroFuBiCo and the LC’s response to it, and neatly summarized what had happened and why and the major points of the report. Naturally FRBR came up, given all of the business in WoGroFuBiCo about suspending work on RDA. Wiggins said FRBR wasn’t tested well yet, but had proven very useful in helping people understand things, and the RDA testing that will be done will test FRBR.

Finally Patrice Landry gave an overview talk: “IFLA to the Rescue: How Division IV (Bibliographic Control) Is Responding to New Issues in Bibliographic Control.” He is the chair of the division, and he went over what it has done in the last couple of decades and has on the go now. There was a lot. Of course FRBR, FRAD, FRSAR, and FRBRoo were mentioned.

After that there were some questions from the audience, and FRBR (or RDA) came up in all of them. My former prof, Lynne Howarth, formerly a member of the FRBR Review Group, asked a good question about training and educating people to go into cataloguing and bibliographic control, and part of one of the answers from the panel was that students should be given a firm grounding in FRBR.

So there you have more excruciating minutiae about mentions of FRBR at this IFLA conference. FRBR is a part of every cataloguing discussion now, either directly or through RDA. It’s interesting to look back and see how things have developed over the last few years. Who knows where things will be in ten years, and how it and everything else about bibliographic control going on now will change things. As I’ve said before, things will only get freakier.

At first I thought it was the pint of cider I’d knocked back over lunch that made the discussions of the Working Group on Functional Requirements for Subject Authority Records (FRSAR) difficult to follow, but I soon realized that the problem was my complete lack of knowledge about what they were discussing.

There isn’t much about FRSAR on the public web, and the IFLA web site doesn’t even list the current working group (WG) members, though it does say Marcia Lei Zeng is the chair and Athena Salaba and Maja Žumer are co-chairs. There were twelve people at the table (later joined by David Miller, making thirteen!), and I caught the names of some other others: Ed O’Neill and Diane Vizine-Goetz of OCLC, Lois Mai Chan, Jonathan Furner, Päivi Pekkarinen, and Dorothy McGarry. I apologize for missing the others.

For some background, have a look at these:

• Status report from Midwinter ALA meeting in January 2008
• Report from ISKO session last week

Here’s an extract from an ALCTS newsletter from February 2008 that gives the gist of it:

Functional Requirements for Subject Authority Records group (FRSAR) members have had several meetings through emails, conference calls, and face-to-face meetings since May 2006. Major outcomes include the definitions of user tasks, a proposal of a new model, and a plan for the final report.

The group held three meetings on August 20 and 24, 2007 at IFLA World Library and Information Congress in Durban, and extensively discussed the proposed model and Group 3 entities. Major outcomes may be summarized as:

1. FRSAR confirms what FRBR has already defined: WORK has-subject THEMA. “Thema” is the term used temporarily to refer to anything that is the subject of a work. Thema includes any FRBR entities.
2. FRSAR proposes the new relationship: THEMA has the appellation NOMEN. “Nomen” is a term used temporarily to refer to any alphanumeric, sound, visual, etc. symbol or combination of symbols by which a thema is known, referred to or addressed.
3. The THEMA-NOMEN relationship is consistent with what FRAD has proposed in its draft report, to separate what a thing is (the concept) from what it is known, referred to or addressed (its name, label).
4. FRSAR group plans to have a draft final report available in the spring of 2008.

To turn up other stuff, search Google for frsar and keep your eye out for mentions of “thema” and “nomen” because you’ll be hearing a lot about them later this year when the FRSAR draft comes out (or so is the plan).

Glenn Patton of OCLC was at the table to discuss FRAD, he chairing the WG on that, and FRAD took up the first hour of the meeting. He said they’d made some changes to the latest draft based on comments, and part of it will be removed and made available separately.

There was some involved discussion of what is an entity, why name and controlled access point are two different entities and not the same, etc. Patton said they wanted to separate the attributes of a person, the names by which they are known, and the access points by which they are found. It seemed easiest to do this by having different entities. Person is related to name is related controlled access point. “Define your entities at least in part by what you want to do with them,” he said, which is why, for example, Family and Agency are different from Corporate Body though they’re really kinds of Corporate Body. It all got rather philosophical and detailed as did, indeed, the entire meeting.

There was discussion of Title and Other Designation as part of name or not. E.g. Jr, III, Professor, Mrs. Discussion of difference between LCCN numbers (as identifier of a record about a person) and social insurance numbers (as identifier of a person). People are unique, but their names aren’t, so we need unique identifiers. But an identifier is a kind of name!

Around 2 the Patton grilling stopped and everyone turned to their FRSAR draft, which no-one else has seen, so the five or six observers were a bit out of it.

Žumer led a discussion about just what a thema is. It’s an entity, it’s a superclass, it’s a supertype, it’s what FRAD calls “bibliographic entities” in its Diagram 2, it’s “things that can potentially enter into subject relationships” as Furner put it. Work is in a many-to-many relationship with Thema, and Thema is in a many-to-many relationship with Nomen, which is basically the name of the subject, as I understand it. (Just as a in FRAD Person and Name are different entities. The map is not the territory.)

It was all getting quite philosophical in here about the nature of a thing in itself and then how we discuss it and name it and how we represent it in our systems. I’ll be honest with you. I zoned out a bit in here. Figures 5.7 and 5.8 of the FRSAR draft were scrutinized. There was more discussion of attributes of entities, then a look at “the Italian model,” and then at 3 they took a break. I left them to it and after a quick chat with Žumer and Vizine-Goetz in the hall I obtained a strong cup of coffee.

This meeting, of a Working Group, was an interesting contrast to the FRBR Review Group. FRSAR doesn’t exist yet, so a table full of experts get togther for two four-hour meetings this month, on top of online discussions and meetings at ISKO and other conferences, and hash out drafts and discuss them and argue over fundamental issues of subject records and how to model them. It’s a slow process. The FRSAR draft should be quite interesting when it’s out, and as FRAD moves to the final version it’s all fitting together, with each of FRAD, FRSAR, and FRBR affecting the other. Slowly it’s all locking into place.

I’m at the IFLA 2008 conference in Quebec City, and just got out of the first meeting of the FRBR Review Group. Here are some notes for those of you who couldn’t be here. I’m writing this on my Eee in the lobby of the convention centre, so forgive me for hyperlink skimpiness.

The meeting began at 8:30 AM in a room that was as far away from the entrance to the convention centre as seems humanly possible. Chairs were set up in the room and there was a table for the Review Group members to sit at … but the chairs all faced away from the table. About eighteen observers were present so we all had to turn our chairs around to face the table, which left us staring at the backs of half of the Review Group. Seven of nine of them were present.

Patricia Riva, chair, distributed the agenda, the annual report (which will go online sometime soon, I think), and a report from Gordon Dunsire which was discussed later. She explained some business about terms of service on the Group and renewals and elections etc.

Next she went through the annual report:

• Various new translations of the FRBR Final Report have been done: Chinese, German, etc.
• Some objectives from the strategic plan were met, for example the amendments to the definition of the Expression entity were made.
• They will be thinking about further changes to FRBR that might be necessary given work on FRAD, FRSAR, FRBRoo, etc., and working with those groups, the ISBD people, etc.
• Work on FRBRoo is continuing. Draft 0.9 came out earlier this year and comments will be reviewed at another meeting. Work on the RDF namespace is continuing. More on both of these below.
• They will support implementations: “Moral support,” said Pat Riva, “we don’t have a budget.”
• Patrick LeBoeuf would like someone to take over the FRBR Bibliography. Some discussion of that.
• Some discussion of the mailing list

Ed O’Neill of OCLC is chair of the Working Group on Aggregates. They are meeting Thursday so nothing is final yet, but he talked about what they’d done and what they generally agreed on. An aggregate is “a bibliographic unit comprised of multiple works,” they all say. The Expression amendment meant changes to thinking about aggregates, because it shifted some things (like a work with a new introduction) from being a new expression of a work to being two aggregate works. Is a bibliographic unit an aggregate or a work in itself? He said the amendment about doubled the number the number of aggregates out there. It puts the emphasis on the intellectual side, not the physical manifestation, and they’re thinking along the same lines. “Is a journal an aggregate of articles, or is it a work in its own right comprised of parts?” Thursday they will review some guidelines that will help people decide on such matters.

O’Neill said the FRBR Report is vague on exactly what a Work is, which makes it hard to discuss aggregates. Lots of nodding at that. He said there were three approaches to thinking about modelling:

• work of works model: there’s a hierarchy of works, for example a journal is a work made up of other works
• manifestation of works model: an aggregate is not a work in itself, it is a manifestation of works
• work of parts model: the simplest but least attractive intellectually; a collection of novels by a writer is a work, and the novels are just parts of it.

The three models are incompatible, but they all have advocates. In a report (not available online, I don’t think) they tried modelling different aggregates with each of the three models to see how they looked.

More will be known after the Thursday meeting. They are determined to be done before the IFLA meeting in Milan next year.

Next was an update on the FRBR/CRM FRBRoo collaboration. The draft received some comments, and they will give close scrutiny to any major problems at the next meeting in a couple of days, and then wrap everything up by e-mail. People are starting to use FRBRoo and want a stable finished version, so they’re going to push along to wrap it up.

The last major thing in the meeting was about representing FRBR in RDF and setting up a proper schema and namespace. Gordon Dunsire had done a project to get this going and you can see his work in the NSDL metadata registry sandbox:

• FRBR Entitles
• FBRR Relationships
• FRBR Relationships as concepts
• FRBR User Tasks

These will be moved out of the sandbox and into the proper registry soon and become provisional.

There was discussion of the Scholarly Works Application Profile and Ian Davis and Richard Newman’s RDF schema, both of which changed and added some things.

There was a lengthy discussion about what to do next, mostly involving administrative and organizational questions that you’d expect at any international organization. I’ll skip them. The upshot of it all is that the Review Group will recommend that IFLA get things in place so that an IFLA namespace exists where this FRBR schema (and expected schemas for FRAD and FRSAR, and who know what else around IFLA) can be housed. “Everything is moving in the direction of the Semantic Web,” Dunsire said, and IFLA should be ready.

So after review and approval and the finding of a proper home, there will be an official RDF schema representing FRBR, authoritative and accurate, properly maintained, under version control, etc.

After all that time was running out. Priorities for future work are the RDF schema and the namespace, and FRBRoo. “Attributes in general are an issue,” Riva said, and perhaps there will be a working group on them. The meeting was adjourned a little after 10:30.